Are Single Women the World's True Romantics?

Rather than spend her energies searching for the off-ramp from singledom, Daphne Merkin revels in the freedom of going it alone.

I am sitting with my sister-in-law, a contented wife and mother of four, in the garden of her summer house on a balmy afternoon. We are discussing the recent remarriage of a friend of hers, an older man who might have been expected to marry a different sort of woman—less arm-candyish and more compelling—than the shiny young blond he ended up choosing. My sister-in-law goes on to observe how none of her single older female friends, whether divorced or widowed, are dating. She says it matter-of-factly, but the obvious implication is that this is an unfortunate situation, something to be clucked over. Looking across her dock at the seagulls companionably weaving in and out of the water, I find myself thinking that I am just like these women, uncoupled and dating no one. The truth of the matter, however, is that far from seeing this as something to be pitied, a large part of me sees it as a condition of inadvertent freedom to be devoutly held on to.

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Lest you think this claim is no more than some form of adroitly rationalized sour grapes, let me hasten to add that I have arrived at this point of view only lately. Like most other heterosexual women, I have spent much of my adult life in relationships with men, as either a girlfriend or once, briefly, as a bona fide wife. After I got divorced in my late thirties, I pretty much expected to marry again and, within the next decade, came close to doing so twice. On both occasions—one contender was an immigration lawyer with an acute case of separation anxiety, the other a compulsively womanizing psychiatrist—I pulled back, unwilling to take the next step. I was afraid of the claustrophobic feeling I associated with being a couple—the way it closes off other romantic options, for one thing (certainly if you're monogamously inclined, as I am), and, for another, dictates that you go through life two by two, like the animals entering Noah's ark.

Sometimes it seems to me that the prospect of waking up every morning to the same face seems like too much of a muchness, a condition primed to induce restlessness in all but the most emotionally sedentary of us. Getting tired of one's partner isn't all that different, when you think about it, from wearying of one's own too-familiar self. To be quite candid about it, being identifed as a couple has always made me feel a bit entrapped, like finding yourself inside a room with the door locked from the outside. I understood implicitly what Michael D., one of the patients in Stephen Grosz's book, The Examined Life, was getting at when he explained that "when I'm in a couple, I feel I'm disappearing, dying—losing my mind." It may be an exaggeration of my own sentiments, but not by much.

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And, indeed, who among us hasn't experienced on occasion the smug, airless "we"-ness of couples, the enforced common ground of their thinking: "We love Verdi," or "We've never gone for Indian food"? Of course, you could argue that this commitment to an unchanging dual identity is a small price to pay for feeling less alone in the world. No matter that it takes a certain degree of clear- eyed, bottom-line calculating to become a couple in the frst place, a cumulative (albeit largely unconscious) assessment that there is no one better for you out there. Or that if there is, the chances are small that you will discover each other— and now is an improvement over never.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that remaining uncoupled in a culture that insists, as the bachelor poet Philip Larkin noted, that "the lion's share of happiness" belongs to couples, requires not only a degree of independence but a curious purism, a singular refusal to yield to the implicit realpolitik that governs our decisions to pair up. For instance: He is not very dashing, but he is movingly generous about my doddering parents. Or: She can't cook for beans and spends too much on clothes, but she lights up any dinner party.

Or, again, where women who want to have children are concerned, there's the pressure of the ever louder and more insistent ticking of the biological clock arguing in favor of the next presentable sperm donor. These are the types of compromised decisions that are made all the time. Although no one accuses couples of being inherently cynical because they may engage in these types of internal negotiations, I'd like to suggest that it is the uncoupled of the world who are the true romantics, sharing in a persistent, possibly puerile, and mostly unvocalized dream of the perfect, unmet Other—the longed-for Platonic half that floats somewhere just out of sight.

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If I look back in time, I can spot the origins of my unease with the institution of coupledom fairly early on. It began with my parents—and the fact that I was mystified by my mother's having chosen my father, a remote and irascible man, to be her mate. I would kindly point out to my mother all his physical flaws, ranging from his "peensy" eyes, as I called them, to his thick, thuggish lips. I could glimpse a few positive qualities from time to time—a honed wit and a wry way with endearments—but I couldn't see these as enough to hook a woman.

On top of this, my father had remained an indulged bachelor until the age of 42, one who had employed a personal valet. My mother ceremoniously laid his clothes out for him every morning and set out a tray with tea and a piece of cake for him every night—in return for which she got, well, I wasn't quite sure. I sensed that my parents shared a certain common frame of reference based on their German-Jewish background, as well as a sophisticated appreciation of theater and movies and a sardonic approach to anyone who came into their purview. But I didn't understand how any of this compensated for my father's tantrums about everything from mislaid pencils to an overlooked phone message and his ceaseless expectation of being waited on hand and foot.

Eventually it occurred to me that for all her lofty espousal of romantic ideals, her dreamy evocations of having waited for a soul mate (she married at 30, which was the equivalent of 50 for an Orthodox Jewish woman of her time), my mother had struck a fairly cold-blooded bargain. Although she routinely denied her interest in the luxuries money can provide, it seemed to me that it was precisely those things that kept my mother tied to my father. His Wall Street earnings paved the way for her to be an unencumbered mother of six children, with a household staff that included a cook, a laundress, a cleaning woman, and a dour Dutch spinster who oversaw us kids. I never saw my mother iron or chop onions—or, indeed, get us up in the morning. Once she waved my father off for the day, buttoning his coat and tucking a Sulka scarf into his collar when it was cold, she was free to spend her time as she chose—which included meeting with her interior decorator and going to the hairdresser, as well as spending the afternoon reading the latest literary fiction.

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All the same, it's not as though I have ever been immune to the charms of men. If anything, I've tended toward an obsessional style in love from the moment I took an interest in the opposite sex. Although I was riddled with ambivalence about anyone I actually dated, I was paradoxically never able to move on with any ease if a relationship didn't work out. There was, for instance, the lawyer with a great sense of humor whom I fell really hard for in my midtwenties. Although we had an impassioned time in bed, so much so that he deemed it wise to invest in a pair of pajamas so that we wouldn't be up all night, I contrived to find him inadequate in the "suburbanness" of his outlook—as opposed to my own presumably more sophisticated Manhattanite perspective.

One Saturday night, after I had criticized him for some failure of sensibility, he brought the affair to a precipitous end by demanding that I get out of his car as we were barreling down Second Avenue on our way to dinner. I can recall, with the sort of pained immediacy that I associate with only the most traumatic events, phoning him for several nights in a row and, without saying a word, proceeding to play Linda Ronstadt singing "Heart Like a Wheel" into the earphone. I eventually even inveigled one of my brothers into calling him up to explain that I was a great girl and that my acid tongue had always gotten the better of me but didn't mean anything. Needless to say, he listened politely to my brother's spiel but remained unpersuaded.

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When I finally got hitched at the age of 34, I did so under some duress. I had been dating the man who became my husband on and off for six years, and although we were more intimately involved than I had ever been with anyone else, I had never reached that point of visceral instinct that he was the one for me. Instead I found myself foundering in doubts, beset by anxiety about his various shortcomings and wondering whether he didn't "translate" outside of the private realm. This matter of a romantic partner's suitability or presentability as a consort in the outside world—as opposed to his fitting in with my idiosyncratic relational needs—was an obstacle I had confronted in almost every relationship I'd been in. I could never seem to find the man who could cross over from the bedroom to the boardroom, so to speak—who cut a compelling figure on both the private and public front.

On top of this, I had learned through hard experience not to trust my own taste, to proceed with caution when it came to choosing a partner. I was naturally drawn to what one shrink of mine described as "wounded pigeons"—men who were lost or sad or angry, men who hadn't quite blossomed—and my husband-to-be was true to type. The long and the short of it was that I got engaged, then broke our engagement and took a break, then finally hurtled myself into marriage on radically short notice after a joint session with my then shrink and my mother—not, you may note, with the man I was about to wed—and arbitrarily set a wedding date in three weeks' time. The 70 people who congregated in my parents' living room on a late November evening to watch me walk numbly down the staircase in an off-white gown that I had chosen at Kleinfeld, one that added pounds to my figure and had an unbecoming bunnytail pom-pom in the back, must have assumed that my hastily convened wedding was a shotgun affair.

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These days, I have taken to hovering on the periphery of the couples I know, trying to ascertain whether the flaw lies with me or with the configuration itself. There are one or two among them who exist primarily as cautionary tales, presenting something akin to a low-grade, festering Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? scenario-in-the-making: couples who bicker so avidly over everything from the way one of them holds the remote control to a perceived failure to wrap a piece of cheese properly that their acrimony gives off fumes. I assume that money, children, or inertia keeps this type of couple intact—chained together for the duration, eliciting equal parts pity and disdain from those around them. Then there are the couples who seem quietly tired of each other, ground down in what the English writer Stella Gibbons called the "long monotony of marriage," but content with their plight all the same. Finally, there are those rare couples who seem enraptured or close to it, friends but more than friends, giving one a scintilla of hope.

Of course, all this reasoning goes only so far. If you asked me whether I would prefer for my 24-year-old daughter to remain alone or to find herself a life partner, I have no doubt that I'd prefer the latter. Finally, there is no way around the fact that being unpartnered comes with a certain amount of emotional discomfort, whether it is at a dinner party where you are the only single person, or on a trip where you tire of striking up conversations in restaurants. Not to overlook the matter of sexual companionship— or, rather, the lack of it. To that point, I can't say I have been completely celibate during the years I've been on my own. There was the man from my romantic youth who reappeared decades later and latched on to me with an intensity that I initially found captivating until I found it irritating, not least because our relationship in bed never matched the soulfulness of our discussions outside of it. Then there was the married mogul whose energy and curiosity were as intriguing as his narcissism was not—and whose highly selective availability began to make me feel like an overage girl toy, to be snuggled up to when the missus was out of town or a business dinner got canceled. Still and all, I'm not the sort of woman who specializes in one-night stands or blissfully casual sex, and the arid patches have been consistent enough to make me wonder if I could make do with a life without sex altogether.

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And here's the surprising part: Although I'd be lying if I said that I've completely made my peace with sleeping alone night after night or that I don't indulge in erotic fantasies, some of which have made their way into my dreams, I can't say I waste much time mooning about my lost carnal life, either. Once you've moved past the age when your hormones run riot, sexual desire becomes more containable and less urgent, more of a choice and less of a compulsion. I think of all the energy I once put into romance and sex, and I feel a slight sense of relief at being out from under anyone's thrall. I also tell myself that given that I'm a writer, there's something to be said for the power of sublimation. Look where it got Freud, who reportedly stopped having sex with his wife in his forties and then went on for 40 more thrillingly productive years, thinking and publishing to beat the band, without taking up sexually with anyone else. (Although there has been speculation that he became involved with his sister-in- law Minna Bernays, it is unproven and strikes me as dubious.)

I'd like to be able to conclude on a note of cheerful finality regarding the unpartnered state, if only not to leave you, the reader, in as irresolute a mind as I am. I'd like, that is, to be able to say: This is where I've ended up, and I'm fine with it. But that would be to underplay my lingering doubts as to whether it is simply a testament to my difficulty in compromising that has left me alone on the raft of life rather than a nobler impulse—as well as a stray, lingering hope or two. Just the other evening, for instance, I found myself in conversation with an attractive stranger...who could turn, if the fates would have it, into an intriguing dinner companion...who could turn (although I'm not betting on it) into someone more permanent, someone whose warm body would grace my bed and whose idle chatter would fill the solitary corners of my life.